This article, reporting the Japanese patients' perceptions of The Good Nurse, discusses the implication of a virtue ethics approach in Asian health care. Virtue ethics and principle based ethics are two major approaches in bioethics and nursing ethics. Principle based ethics emphasizes action. Virtue ethics argues about morally valued character traits within the agent who performs actions. As part of an ongoing cross-national collaborative research project conducted in Asian countries, we explored Japanese patients' perceptions of The Good Nurse, an ethical ideal based in virtue ethics theory that nurse educators and clinicians strive to achieve. Van Kaam's controlled explication was used to conduct and analyze semi-structured, audio-taped interviews with 26 cancer patients who knew their diagnosis. According to these Japanese participants, both personal and professional qualities characterized The Good Nurse. The patients valued a person-to-person relationship with nurses. Implication of the study includes: an understanding of the meaning of 'good' as applied to patient care situations, and a contribution to the development of a virtue ethics foundation in Asian health care.

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